Hard disc available space.

Topic

I’m trying not to appear stupid here, but I’m a little baffled by this. When I started my laptop this morning, the free space on my hard drive was showing as 396gb. It’s a 512gb SSD.

I’ve been working (?) on it all morning, internet, word, excel and the like. I just went to File Explorer looking for a file I needed and noticed that the free space was now showing as 404gb. Where did that 8gb come from? I have seen it many times and have put it down to temporary stuff that eventually gets deleted but would like to be put at ease.

Windows 11 Home, Version 23H2, RAM 8.00gb, x64

 

Thanks in advance.

Replies

What does Settings, System, Storage, Storage Sense say?

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PL1

Storage sense is on

When Storage Sense is ON, disk space may be freed up automatically based on your settings in the Storage Sense details.

--Joe

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Tony H

These are the storage sense settings:

“Content will become online only if not opened for more than 30 days”

Ouch! I never want that setting, I want all my data local and maybe have online backup.
I’d turn SS off.

cheers, Paul

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Tony H

Tony H wrote:

Windows 11 Home, Version 23H2, RAM 8.00gb, x64

Sidebar thought.

With 8GB of RAM on your laptop, windows is likely doing a lot of page file swapping, and in this circumstance the size of the page file can be large.  Not bad, just large and could influence reported disk space.

You can check using the built-in windows Resource Monitor and see how much RAM is being used with all your usual apps running.

Desktop mobo Asus TUF X299 Mark 1, CPU: Intel Core i7-7820X Skylake-X 8-Core 3.6 GHz, RAM: 32GB, GPU: Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti 4GB. Display: Four 27" 1080p screens 2 over 2 quad.

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Tony H

Thank you for all the info and advice.